Word: hasid
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...both terminals he has borne witness to the Jewish catastrophes that dwarf the past and pre-empt the future: pogroms, the Holocaust, assimilation and its concomitant, the dying of the Yiddish language in which he writes. And yet within this spare grandpaterfamilias still resides the spirit of a young Hasid, whose nights were animated by ghosts leaping about the Sabbath candles, inanimate objects given life by the Evil One and the immanent...
More often, Agnon transcends the Orthodoxy of his material. In The Bridal Canopy, the Hasid Reb Yudel Nathanson, a deliberately quixotic hero, half saint, half shlemiel, sets out to beg a dowry for his daughters. The book is one long metaphor for the wandering Jew, but Agnon heroes have a disconcerting universality. "A difficult thing to grasp," says Reb Yudel, pondering war. "What satisfaction do the kings derive in sending folk of this countryside to another land and folk of another land to this countryside? What difference does it make to the Angel of Death whether he has to come...
Danny is a Hasid-a member of the ultra-Orthodox sect that affects earlocks, broad-brimmed hats and long, black overcoats-while Reuven, the novel's narrator, practices a more liberal Judaism. As the son of a tzaddik (as the Hasids' hereditary rabbis are called), Danny must follow his father as the sect's leader, though his personal bent is toward psychology. Gradually, the two boys work toward Danny's inevitable break with tradition and discover along the way that the humanistic content of Judaism far outweighs its rigid ritualism...
...early writing, derivative and totally unoriginal, deeply dissatisfied him. "Many times I contemplated suicide because of my intellectual impotence. . . . Satan did not allow me to express my individuality." And though he was outwardly a normal Hasid, the people of his town suspected his untraditional intellectual activity. His brother went to Russia and involved himself in the revolutionary movement...
Meaning v. Thought. Buber's work is influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. It is also inspired by an 18th century Jewish movement called Hasidism. The modern Hasidism (from the Hebrew hasid, meaning pious) sprang up in the Polish ghettos and followed the zaddikim, or holy men, who rebelled against excessive emphasis on law and scholarship, which seemed to confine Judaism. They were cheerful mystics who insisted on sharing their personal inspirations with the whole community. Buber, a leading collector of Hasidic lore, is in a sense himself a zaddik. He too rebels against the overrigid emphasis...